Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/35

Rh upon the conversation, and toyed with her food, not knowing how to attract attention to herself. Her mother seemed unable to control her and, reluctant to scold her, since that would draw the minx's malice upon herself, she cast distressed glances at Dobouziez.

He resisted his wife's desperate appeal as long as he possibly could. Finally, he interfered. Gina yielded instantly, with an amusingly martyred air, to the kindly command of her father. In behalf of Gina the head of the family dispensed with his habitual rigidity. He controlled himself with a violent effort that he might not reply to the irritating sallies of his darling child; when he did finally call her to account, it was only in self-defence. And the unaccustomed sweetness of his tone and of his look recalled to Laurent the voice and the smile of Jacques Paridael. So much so that Lorki, for that was the name by which his dear absent father had called him, could hardly believe that the cousin Dobouziez who was remonstrating with his little Gina was the same rigid disciplinarian who, at the sad ceremony so shortly before, had commanded him to do this, and then that, to do so many things that he had not known which to do first. And in what a brief and peremptory tone those instructions had been uttered!

What matter; though his childish heart was breaking at the comparison, the Lorki of yesterday, the Laurent of to-day did not bear his little cousin a grudge for being the favorite. She was far too beautiful for that! But, had it been a question of some other child, a boy like himself, for example, the orphan would bitterly have resented this revelation of the extent of his loss; he would have experienced malice and hate as well as consternation and despair. It would have